Companies, and in particular, companies in technical fields classify various information to various classifications for the company archives and for other purposes. One such other purpose is for patent searching. Companies may obtain various patents to store into a company archive. Commonly this is done using a group of trained searchers that read and classify the patents according to a pre-identified classification system. One problem with such a system is that the searchers must be familiar with the classification system and the underlying technology to properly classify the document. This is a very labor intensive and costly process because a substantial amount of time is required to classify the documents.
As technology changes, it may be desirable from time to time to change classification systems or add subclasses within various classifications. To accomplish this in a manual fashion would require searchers a substantial amount of time to re-read the patents or other documents in a class and classify them into a new class or a subclass.
It would therefore be desirable to provide a classification system capable of automatically determining the classifications of documents and capable of reclassifying documents when reclassification or division of classes is desired.